One of the major concerns of ACD system call managers is motivating their agents and maintaining the agents' interest and demeanor. Presently, no truly effective techniques for maintaining agent motivation appear to exist. The result is widespread low morale, high stress, and a high rate of turnover among ACD agents. The consequent human and dollar costs are high.
Call managers try to motivate agents by providing incentives, such as having contests between agents about who handles the greatest number of calls, or awarding bonus points for handled calls that are applied toward prizes. But, other than trying to keep their own count of calls handled or points awarded--a very difficult thing to do given the extremely busy nature of ACD agents' work--the agents typically do not have a ready and real-time source of up-to-date information of this sort. Lacking this information, they become bored, lax, and lose motivation. Furthermore, this purely quantitative form of motivation, e.g., based entirely on the numbers of calls handled, or sales made, can lead to undesirable results, such as agents trying to pass difficult and time-consuming calls to other agents, or being discourteous and curt with customers, in order to handle calls as fast as possible.
To forestall such undesirable results, call managers have, and employ, a capability of listening in on agents' calls, whereby they are able to evaluate the quality of agents' performance. But the call managers typically lack an effective way of immediately conveying the results of their evaluation to the agents. Hence, in order to either correct an agent's technique or to motivate the agent with praise, the manager must interrupt the agent's work and give him or her oral feedback. Because of the deleterious effect of such interruptions, the giving of feedback is typically reserved for the end of the agent's workday. But coming only at the work end, such feedback is not wholly effective. Furthermore, lacking such feedback during the workday, agents become bored, lax, and lose motivation.